In a distributed cluster of computers, a job scheduler is often used to manage when and where jobs run for more efficiently utilizing the resources in the cluster. A job scheduler receives job requests from end users and then dispatches the jobs to various computers. Job scheduling needs to be performed in such a way that critical workload can run when desired and on the machine resources required. Additionally, a job scheduling scheme should be able to efficiently set aside time on a set of machines for maintenance purposes.
One job scheduling function is advance reservation, which can enable computing resources to be reserved in advance so that they can be dedicated to run a certain workload or be used for maintenance purposes. However, current job schedulers support advance reservations are not compatible with massively parallel processing systems such as a Blue Gene/L system of International Business Machines Corporation (“IBM”) of White Plains, N.Y., United States of America. A job associated with a Blue Gene/L system is run on a subset of Blue Gene/L hardware components. These components are exclusively allocated to that job. Current job schedulers incorporating advance reservation are not capable of taking into account the specific resources of a massively parallel processing system and cannot perform advance reservation for these systems.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.